Have I mentioned that Duff Cooper has a gambling problem? Well, he does… but this is rural France, not London. Cooper made it through his first tour in the trenches with flying colors: not only were there no tumbling dice to trip him up, but he found himself tolerably brave (or perhaps braver than expected)–and the food, too. Even the trenches themselves were not as awful as he had imagined… but there are other dangers lurking in comfortable quarters behind the line.
June 11, 1918
I went over to dine with Peter Adderley. We had a very pleasant dinner although the food was not so good as what we have. They are a much happier family than we are, there is less ceremony and altogether a far pleasanter atmosphere. Dudley Coats turned up after dinner and we played that absurd game Marmora. I like a fool lost £220. I had a quite extraordinarily bad lunch. We got rather drunk towards the end of the evening. I am a fool–a fool.[1]
So that would be roughly 100 times his daily pay, lost in an evening, when a primary obstacle to his marriage to Diana Manners is his parlous financial circumstances…
Vera Brittain is once more betwixt and between. Her parents pressured her to come home and be a dutiful daughter after her mother’s breakdown, so she is once more out of the V.A.D.s. But although no one has accused her mother of entirely faking her nervous breakdown, her condition seems to have improved as soon as her daughter was safely home from France. She does not now need intense care, anyway, and Vera is unhappy staying at home and managing a small household. So she has begun to look ahead, recently considering both a return to the V.A.D.s and (briefly) applying to serve in the W.A.A.C. (where she would in all likelihood be something of a household manager in uniform). But all this also means that she has time to write–not only the semi-autobiographical novel which Mrs. Leighton is encouraging, but also poetry.
In a bit of a crossing of paths, today, she wrote a poem for her brother Edward, looking ahead only a few weeks–and it might take two or three weeks to get to him, in Italy–to the anniversary of his wounding on the first day of the Somme. And the poem came with a tangible gift: Vera inscribed it on the flyleaf of a new book she had purchased for him, none other than The Muse in Arms, probably the most influential of the mid-war anthologies of war verse.[2]
On their way, then, to Edward Brittain, are not only a Vera Brittain original but also published poems by Herbert Asquith, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Julian Grenfel, Ivor Gurney, Noel Hodgson, E.A. Mackintosh, Robert Nichols, Max Plowman, Siegfried Sassoon, Osbert Sitwell, Charles Sorley, J.W. Streets, and Bim Tennant, among several others that we have discussed here, and a dozen or more that we haven’t.
So, the prudent reader can read Vera’s poem, below, and reflect on the Somme, nearly two years gone. Or they can jump down the rabbit hole of half-forgotten names above, testing the hypothesis that reading a war in “real time” will challenge the memory in ways that briefly and intensively brushing up does not…
To My Brother
(In memory of July 1st, 1916)
Your battle wounds are scars upon my heart,
Received when in that grand and tragic “show”
You played your part
Two years ago,And silver in the summer morning sun
I see the symbol of your courage glow—
That Cross you won
Two years ago.Though now again you watch the shrapnel fly,
And hear the guns that daily louder grow,
As in July
Two years ago,May you endure to lead the Last Advance
And with your men pursue the flying foe
As once in France
Two years ago.